Deifying Jesus?
To answer Brown’s accusation, we must first determine what Christians in general believed before Constantine ever convened the council at Nicaea.
According to ancient manuscripts, Christians had been worshiping Jesus as God since the 1st century. But in the 4th century, Arius, a church leader from the east, launched a campaign to defend God’s oneness. He taught that Jesus was a specially created being, higher than the angels, but not God.
Athanasius and most church leaders, on the other hand, were convinced that Jesus was—as the New Testament eyewitnesses claimed— God in the flesh.
Constantine wanted to settle the dispute, hoping to bring peace to his empire, uniting the east and west divisions. Therefore, in AD 325 he convened more than 300 bishops at Nicaea (now part of Turkey) from throughout the Christian world.
The crucial question is, did the early church think Jesus was the Creator or merely a creation—Son of God or merely son of a carpenter? To answer that question they looked to what the apostles believed and taught. So, what did the apostles teach about Jesus?
From their very first recorded statements, the apostles regarded Jesus as God. About 30 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, Paul wrote the Philippians that Jesus was God in human form (Philippians 2:6-7, NLT). And John, a close eyewitness, confirms Jesus’ divinity in the following passage:
In the beginning the Word already existed. He was with God, and he was God. He created everything there is. Nothing exists that he didn’t make. Life itself was in him…So the Word became human and lived here on earth among us” (John 1: 1-4, 14, NLT).
This passage from John 1, has been discovered in an ancient manuscript, a copy of the original, carbon-dated at AD 175-225. Earlier fragments from John’s Gospel have also been discovered, proving that Jesus was clearly spoken of as God over a hundred years before Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea (See Appendix page 92, “Did the Apostles Believe Jesus is God?”).
This forensic manuscript evidence contradicts The Da Vinci Code’s claim that Jesus’ deity was a 4th century invention. But what does history tell us about the Council of Nicaea? Brown asserts in his book, through Teabing, that the majority of bishops at Nicaea overruled Arius’s belief that Jesus was a “mortal prophet” and adopted the doctrine of Jesus’ deity by a “relatively close vote.” True or false?
The historical record reveals that only two of the 318 bishops dissented, one of them being Arius himself. Whereas Arius believed that the Father alone was God, and that Jesus was his supreme creation, the council overwhelmingly concluded that Jesus and the Father were of the same divine essence, condemning Arius as a heretic. The nearly unanimous vote only confirmed what the apostles had taught.
The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were deemed to be distinct, coexistent, coeternal Persons, but one God. This doctrine of one God in three Persons became known as the Nicene Creed, which is the central core of the Christian Faith and its trinitarian doctrine.
From the first days of the Christian church, Jesus was regarded as far more than a mere man, and most of his followers worshiped him as Lord-the Creator of the universe. So, how could Constantine have invented the doctrine of Jesus’ divinity if the church had regarded Jesus as God for more than 200 years? The Da Vinci Code doesn’t address this question.
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